After a three-year absence from Capitol Hill, more than 250 grant makers and nonprofit leaders began a three-day gathering in Washington Monday to press lawmakers to provide donors with more incentives to give and to provide nonprofits with an official voice in federal policy discussions.
The advocacy effort, known as Foundations on the Hill, has not been conducted in person since Covid erupted in 2020.
The visits and a full day of panel discussions were organized by the United Philanthropy Forum, a network of regional associations of grant makers and coalitions that focus on specific causes, like international aid and health, in conjunction with Independent Sector and the Council on Foundations.
Usually the grant makers and others at the Capitol Hill event fan out to lawmakers’ offices to bring them up to speed on policies that directly affect nonprofit regulation and tax incentives to give money to charity. Those issues, including legislation that would allow all taxpayers, not just high-income Americans, to take a deduction for charitable gifts, will remain front and center.
This year, however, the event’s organizers want to “connect the dots” between bread-and-butter nonprofit policy and philanthropic efforts to promote equity in the localities nonprofits serve, said Matthew Evans senior director for public policy at the United Philanthropy Forum.
Members of the group, including Grantmakers Concerned With Immigrants and Refugees, for instance, will focus on immigration issues. Hill visitors will also press lawmakers to consider policy options for ensuring that the next census results in a complete tally of many Americans, including Black and Latino people who have been historically undercounted. And they will push for legislation allowing foundations to provide scholarships to help pay off student debt to people after they graduate from college or technical school if they work in an area that has suffered population declines.
“We really want to underscore how important it is for the sector to add advocacy as a tool to how philanthropy works in addition to funding,” Evans said. “We’ve expanded our talking points to include not just issues that impact the sector traditionally but to also to talk about issues that impact the communities that we serve.”
Giving Incentives
Still, charitable tax incentives remain the most pressing issue for the groups gathering in the Capitol. When Congress passed a broad tax bill in 2017, the standard deduction for taxpayers who don’t itemize their deductions was doubled. Doing so erased any tax incentive to give for most Americans. An attempt to provide a separate deduction for those taxpayers failed during the last session of Congress.
The disappearance of the tax incentive has resulted in a decline in the number of people who give, said Jeffrey Moore, chief strategy officer at Independent Sector. After donors responded to pressing needs early in the pandemic, giving tapered off. During the first six months of 2022, the number of donors who made gifts to charities dropped by 7 percent, a decline largely driven by the absence of donors who make small gifts.
“We have a real problem with the donor pipeline,” Moore said.
In addition to pushing to renew the charitable giving incentive, the meetings on Capitol Hill will give his group’s members an opportunity to push for two other priorities: a new White House office on the nonprofit sector, and a requirement that the Bureau of Labor Statistics keep track of nonprofit employment measures.
Currently, nonprofits are unable to accurately assess the wages, gender, age, and other employment data on its work force because the federal government doesn’t collect that data.
“If you are a private limo driver or a commercial goat herder, you can tell on a quarterly basis what’s happening to wages and employment numbers in your sector,” Moore said. “We can’t for nonprofits.”
The nonprofit groups are pushing the Biden administration to create a liaison in the White House through an executive order. Moore characterized talks with the White House to do so as positive, but he said that if Congress passed similar legislation, the office would last beyond a single administration.
With control of Congress split between Democrats and Republicans and political tension between the two parties at a high boil, it’s futile to predict that any particular bill will be signed into law, many observers say. But fears that Congress won’t be productive are no reason to let off the gas, says David Kass, vice president for government affairs and legal resources at the Council on Foundations. Nonprofits, he said, need to use every opportunity to educate lawmakers about philanthropy’s priorities.
“The challenge of getting anything through Congress these days is to just make enough noise that it becomes enough of a priority,” he said.
The visitors to Washington don’t just face Congress with members at odds with each other, according to William Schambra, senior fellow emeritus at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. They will also come face-to-face with a growing number of conservative populists distrustful of any established institution.
As progressive leaders pursue big changes to end racism or to take apart the market-based system of capitalism, “they cannot feign surprise that many people think foundations have an agenda seriously at odds with traditional values,” Schambra wrote in remarks prepared for a panel discussion planned for today.
Schambra pointed to Sen. J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican who was critical of foundations during his senate race last year, and suggested that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will soon take on progressive foundations during his expected bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
It’s possible, according to Schambra, that conservative populists will find common ground with progressives who have long been critical of philanthropy.
“They share a distrust of concentrated power in the hands of the wealthy, which foundations embody,” he wrote. “If that happens, American foundations may be in for a rough ride.”
